The Gang — Doc Searls, Robert W. Anderson, Sam Whitmore, Dan Farber, Mike Vizard, Mike Arrington, and Dana Gardner. Recorded Thursday December 20, 2007.

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GILLMOR: What’s going on?

UNKNOWN: That’s what I thought.

(laughter)

UNKNOWN: From the department of understate.

GILLMOR: Confirmed nothing as usual

ANDERSON: Nothing as usual.

GILLMOR: but very noisy

FARBER: well I think there is quite naturally at this time of year a mixed shift that goes on (interrupted)

WHITMORE: Hey there

FARBER: less interest in the world of technology, more interested in some downtime.

GILLMOR: So Doc you have to go to a meeting ugh so.

SEARLS: At 2:30, so um I hoping I can sneak out and sneak back in and just make a quite beep when I re-arrive. I’m not sure what the deal is but I’m just going to know.

WHITMORE: Well Doc this is Sam I just want to tell you just how much I enjoy those photographs of the ice in Greenland and all the other parts of the planet we might otherwise never see.

SEARLS: Well that’s cool, yeah. It beats being bored on the plane. I just love looking out the window, I always have, I just think its an amazing thing to see global warming happening live, underneath the window its what you get to watch.

WHITMORE: What happens when you get an aisle seat

SEARLS: I don’t.

Laughter

SEARLS: I haven’t gotten an isle seat in a long time, fortunately I’ve gotten high enough privileges of united at this point that I can almost always get the seat that is close enough to what I want. So what I like doing is just showing up there, there is this little development with airlines, a year a go if you walked up to the counter at United or any other airline and whipped open you laptop and went to seat guru they would flip out, like “oh my god, oh my god look at that, that’s very interesting that is much more information than we have”. Now its like I’m so glad you have that because that’s good. There is a symbiosis now that’s going on between seat guru and seat expert on the one hand and the airlines on the other. Not that their IT systems are getting any better because of it but because they recognize that the customer is in possession of some very useful information, which is really cool. It has nothing to do with photographing Greenland but its cool. Anyway.

FARBER: Part of the vendor relationship management

SEARLS: It is actually, I hadn’t thought of it that way but I think it’s in the general zeitgeist. It’s a little bit of progress going on. I also notice I’m less likely to get busted for holding a GPS to the window.

(laughter)

GILLMOR: How does that work? What type of radioism is that in?
It just receives the very faint navigational signals from GPS satellites out in space and does the math inside itself and says where you are. That’s what it does. It doesn’t radiate anything. All it does..

GILLMOR: (interrupts) So it’s not a portable device of the types you’re supposed to turn off?

SEARLS: Well you’re supposed to turn off every that has an on-off switch. You’re also supposed to turn off something they call- you’re not supposed to use something they call cellular wi-fi technology, which I always thought was pretty funny because you can always pull out your laptop on almost any flight and see several rouge transmissions going on by who have unknowingly created wi-fi hotspots inside their computers trying to type in some SSID somewhere and so they’re putting out a signal anyway.

WHITMORE: When the plane guys saying their going put wi-fi on the plan are they just talking about within the plane or wi-fi everywhere to connect everybody, everyplace?

SEARLS: It depends, I know it’s when the connection system is working with the Boeing system with Luftansa and SAF, I think are the only ones who used it. There was a wi-fi thing on the plane that said connection. It was just like in a hotel, you would open up a browser window, you say ok and I’ll pay 28 bucks for this flight and you’re on. And you’re getting a satellite connection and they’re hooking up to a satellite somewhere, I don’t know where, but they make a connection to the net. But I haven’t been, Boeing pulled out of the business and for a while it ran anyways. I don’t know what’s going on with that, has anybody been on a flight with the connection to the net lately? Anybody on the call?

FARBER: Nope

GILLMOR: there were a flurry of announcements about plans, there is one plane at JetBlue that doing email.

SEARLS: See I don’t know that that means, what does that mean?

GILLMOR: It means they’ve got some sort of a connection to the satellite that they are running email over. They’re not allowing you to access a browser.

ARRINGTON: Have any of your guys had full Internet access on an airplane?

SEARLS: Yeah

ARRINGTON: Any of the old Luftansa and SAF flights?

SEARLS: Yeah those two.

ARRINGTON: Yeah I did that a couple of times, yeah it was awesome. From Seattle to Copenhagen and you pay 20 bucks and you had pretty good broadband access for 10 or 11 hours.

SEARLS: Yeah I measured it a couple of times, 300 up, 300 down. It did the job. Yeah is was like EVDO on the plane.

ARRINGTON: Yeah I was doing Skype just to test it out and it was working and instant messaging was working great. It was really cool. I was actually on a flight to Copenhagen and it must have been 2005 when the London bombing occurred in the summer and I was on the flight when It happened and my friends in London started Skyping me and telling me about it and for some reason the pilot couldn’t get much information, so the stewardesses, the flight attendants were actually coming back to me to get information and tell the pilot what was going on because no one knew exactly how bad it was. It was actually a really interesting experience.

SEARLS: Wow

GILLMOR: To finish what I was saying. Jet Blue has plans to do it. Virgin America also has plans to do it and they’re already using some sort of wi-fi service inside the plane or at least a wired service where you can talk from your seat and order food and drinks and that kind of stuff and they’re supposed to be expanding it. I believe American is going to be offering service in the within the next two months.

FARBER: So do you think we will have enough performance to support a movie video over the internet or do they still want you to watch.(interrupted)

GILLMOR: Well if the kind of service Mike is talking about comes to this country then I guess so. Skype is..

ARRINGTON: If you start downloading a movie or running bit torrent you’re going to start screwing it up for the whole airplane to so.

ANDERSON: Yeah Skype takes up less bandwidth than a video

FARBER: So we’ll have new social roles for behavior on airplanes in the age of the internet.

WHITMORE: No hogging the bandwidth

(Laughter)

Yeah that’s part of it but the other part of it in Jet Blue’s case they have a contract with DirectTV and I’ll bet DirectTV does not want people having a richer internet experience browsing when they ought to be watching TV.
I supposed, but there will probably be somebody yelling from the front of the plane, hey stop bogarting that Internet.

(Laughter)

ARRINGTON: Its amazing to me that the airlines still haven’t gotten it, its my understanding that they shut it down, they shut it down, I forgot was it boeing connect, what was it called?

WHITMORE: Connection with an X.

ARRINGTON: Connection with an X.

SEARLS: there is a really good Wikipedia thing on it.

ARRINGTON: and they shut it down because not enough people bought it?

SEARLS: You know that’s never been settled, there were a number of different stories about it that I heard at the time but the biggest one was that it cost them too much, they put a huge amount effort into it.

ARRINGTON: Was it a sunk cost or had marginal cost per flight because..

SEARLS: The weird thing was that it was a huge sunk cost and they just didn’t see it paying out in the long run.

ARRINGTON: Ok so I bet everyone on this phone probably agrees with me and that if you’re staying in a hotel room and you had to choose between internet access and say running water. I mean you need electricity to power the laptop but it’s a basic utility that you have to have and if there was an airline, lets say virgin America which I’ve flown a bit to New York and I really like the airline if they had internet access they could charge three tons what United charges and it wouldn’t even be a decision, I would fly just so I wouldn’t be offline for those few hours and I have to think its not just because I’m a blogger there are a lot of company executives that don’t want to be offline and they would pay almost anything to be on it.

FARBER: I resent being

SEARLS: I agree.

FARBER: I resent being nickel and dimed at these hotels for internet access that I know doesn’t cost them that much to create and ultimately people are picking hotels that give them free internet access over the ones they have to pay for. I’d say that might play out on the airlines.

ARRINGTON: When we were in France last week at the Le Web Conference I was talking to Om and Kevin in the lobby of the hotel having coffee and Om mentioned that he was writing most of his posts offline and going to the conference to email people to post for him because he wouldn’t pay the 20 euro fee for the internet, which was like 30 dollars.

SEARLS: Wow.

ARRINGTON: And we were giving him a lot of shit for that.

SEARLS: He’s a cheaper bastard than I thought.

ARRINGTON: We said Jesus you are one cheap bastard. Yeah, he was defending his position, he said he had investors and had to watch the money.

SEARLS: That is too an extreme fault right there.

ARRINGTON: Well if I were one of his investors I would want him online right.

SEARLS: Exactly, Exactly.

ARRINGTON: He just wouldn’t pay it.

SEARLS: Wow, wow. The interesting thing was with it, was that two years ago most hotels didn’t have it, now almost every hotel has it, but the variation from one hotel to another is very extreme and I know I can generally expected it to be good at a Hyatt or a Marriot and a couple of others but there are a lot that say they have high speed internet and they really suck.

ARRINGTON: I just EVDO now, I mean it works well everywhere.

SEARLS: Yeah, but if you have Verizon EVDO you cant use it overseas. That’s a problem for me.

ARRINGTON: Right, right.

SEARLS: Like that hotel was pretty marginal, I mean I think we all stayed at that same hotel. The upstream is nothing and the downstream is ok, but the upstream is so bad that I couldn’t upload any large files.

ARRINGTON: Yeah I couldn’t upload pictures or anything. I didn’t even try to upload anything. But it was good enough to blog so that’s all that matters to me.

SEARLS: So here’s an interesting thing I didn’t fly back with this guy but I hung out with him in the very long line at United at Charles De Gaulle and it turned out it was this guy who worked for Swisscom, which is the company who did the wi-fi at the show and he said one of the reasons it melted down on the first day was that they had no idea there would be that many iPhones trying to get on.

ARRINGTON: That’s what happened at our conference, that is what shut us down.

SEARLS: He said the iPhone has changed the whole damn game in a big way too, they have to deal with it.

GILLMOR: Amazing

ARRINGTON: And its not the bandwidth in the sheer number of connections hitting the routers that shut it down.

SEARLS: Exactly. You saw a number of people who had a laptop and an iPhone working at the same time and he said it’s just a lot. It’s not just the demand for bits but it’s how many live connections you have at once. It’s been interesting because I gave my wife an iPhone for her birthday and she uses it just as much as a browser as she does use it as a phone. I jokingly created the term Phrowser just as a joke but some people picked up on it. I think it’s a new animal. I think it’s a phone that’s also a browses and it’s a good browser, I mean a lot of phones have browsed for a long time but the iPhone is the first one that is so good at what it does at least relatively speaking. And probably 3 years from now we’ll barf on it but at this point in time its so much better.

ARRINGTON: Do you think in 3 years we barf at the interface because the speed sucks but the interface and the way you can pinch it or grow it, I just don’t see how you can make it any better, I mean you can make the screen better and the resolution maybe better but its better than anything else on the market.

WHITMORE: It’ll be a 3d interface by then

GILLMOR: The way you make the iPhone better is by making the in points better, I mean that’s Google’s been doing, their whole operating system is built for first the iPhone.

SEARLS: Right

GILLMOR: I mean they rebooted it, what a month ago? And Facebook’s interface for the iPhone is extremely fast to use it and it isn’t nearly as complete as it needs to be but you adopt the bookmarks and you’re done. And the thing that I really think is going to happen is the number of instances of the browser you can open is about 6. So composite applications that are made to swap in and out of the same browser instance, so you can go to Techmeme, you can go to Techcrunch, you can go to 3 or 4 of those sites all within the same browser instance, all without losing your same state.

ARRINGTON: Or you can go to Meebo even when you switch out of the browser.

GILLMOR: Yeah exactly.

SEARLS: I have a quick question for those of you who maintain big websites, especially you Mike. Have you changed presentation of loading based on iPhone usage?

ARRINGTON: Yeah the iPhone has negated the need to. The old mobile browsers Techcrunch looked like shit on but on the iPhone it looks beautiful. So we have stopped dealing with mobile optimization entirely.

SEARLS: I know when I use my wife’s phone to browse I am much more inclined to go to sites that are non complex and load fast. The top bookmark is Dave Winer’s NYTimes observer which just goes bang its on there and it looks good.

ARRINGTON: Yeah Techmeme loads quickly

SEARLS: Good

ARRINGTON: I probably wouldn’t read Techcrunch other than its mine. It doesn’t load quickly, you have to suffer through but im ok with that, but I don’t have the resources to build a stripped down version.

GILLMOR: Yeah but because you have a full-text feed its very fast to consumer the main story. If you want to view the comments then you have to dive into the actual website.

ARRINGTON: Have you guys actually looked at any websites on the Kindle yet?

GILLMOR: No

ARRINGTON: It’s like the surfing of the Internet in 1993, its awesome.

SEARLS: Really.

ARRINGTON: Yeah it has to be the worst browser.

SEARLS: I didn’t even know the Kindle did websites I thought it just did text.

ARRINGTON: Yeah its under browser, under experimental.

GILLMOR: Do you have to rent access to each site?

ARRINGTON: No, no the browser is open, you can go to any url, its great.

GILLMOR: So what is the feature where you buy TechCrunch for a $1.99?

ARRINGTON: I think its called blogs or something and you can scroll through bunch and you can buy a feed and pay for it. You can still view it on the browser for free with the comments, with the feed reader you can view the comments. I bought it myself and I didn’t even try to extended it after the trial it was so bad and that’s to my own website.

WHITMORE: I enjoyed you post. I’m sorry to interrupt Mike. I enjoyed your post last week about the Kindle going for 1500 bucks on ebay after we discussed it here last week.

ARRINGTON: I told you guys I was gonna post, I got two good posts out of the gang last week. The Knoll post came out of it and right away that ebay post came out of it and no one had noticed, but yeah those things are ridiculously priced on ebay.

WHITMORE: So what will be this week?

GILLMOR: That’s right. So what is important this week, anything?

WHITMORE: Hey I want to start a fire or potentially, I want to ask Steve Gilmore if he personally thinks that Microsoft Office is dead?

GILLMOR: Yes…

WHITMORE: And ill tell you why because Dan Farber made a post on December 18th at 7:07 that reported a blog item that independent researchers say there is no such movement, that Microsoft office is doing very well, but since Dan’s on the line maybe he can elaborate.

FARBER: I’ve written this probably a 1000 times, there are lots of ankle bitters out there with web based application suites and they’ve got millions or hundreds of thousands of users but it doesn’t seem to take anything out of Microsoft’s pocketbook, yet. And all of the people who are doing cloud based applications are making sure that they have all flying capabilities and Microsoft is making sure it has online capabilities integrated with its suite. So it varies the different balances of how much is on the client, how much is on the cloud. They’re all going to end up on the same place.

ARRINGTON: So I’ve learned enough about journalism about whatever it is we do that when I saw that study I said wow that’s going to be a great story and it was a great story, but I also thought it was a bunch of crap and its just too early in the cycle for it to be meaningful, but you know people go “oh yeah look Google doc’s and Zoho and all that, they’re not going to have no chance.” It’s like saying in 1993 that the Internet is not a big deal yet.

GILLMOR: Its like saying Facebook has no chance last year, it’s exactly right.

FARBER: Yeah I think it’s similar.

GILLMOR: I don’t mean to denigrate the analysis Dan has had over the years that’s its obviously patently true, but that Microsoft has huge scale and everyone on this call at one point or another has said that Microsoft is not going away and that they are going to be dominant for more years to come and that they have more cash than God etc etc. On the other hand, the forces that are at work within the industry have never been more challenging for Microsoft than they are today. Now if that impacts visibly on their bottom lie today, we’re talking about an intense monopoly with Windows.

WHITMORE: Well I found the most profound thing that Dan said was that there will be no difference at the end of the day. That everyone will have an online capability and offline capability and then it’s going to be what’s the difference here.

FARBER: Yeah I think the point I was trying to make in that post was not so much that there is some research coming up to tells us something we already know and that’s its early in the game, but in time I think Google has a pretty unique advantage and I think that increasingly search is going to become more important as something you use all the time not just to kind of surf the web and find things but when you’re in an application. For example, when you’re in an application and you are writing something and you need to find well what have I written about this before or what’s on the web about this that I can link to in here?

GILLMOR: It’s that question that is identical in both cases, — the answer is the same, they’re both on the web now.

FARBER: But all I’m saying is Google has an advantage in that case because they are the search go to.

GILLMOR: I don’t think so.

ARRINGTON: Dan you’re a PC aren’t you?

FARBER: I am politically correct, yeah.

ARRINGTON: Mac guys use quicksilver, I mean I agree with you, but you just have to move to Mac because it’s already there. And you’re constantly searching on your computer or your hard drive and adding web search, it doesn’t really matter where your data is anymore.

FARBER: yeah right, that’s what I’m saying but Google has an advantage in that because they’re so identified and have such a strong presence as a search engine and a brand and its very easy to see them not just make collaboration a part of their suite, but also their desktop search and their web search and all other types of search utilities.

WHITMORE: It doesn’t seem to me that they are leveraging very hard on their search footprint to drive people to Google apps. It still feels like people use Google Apps when they find a use for it and they have it, but I’m not feeling like every time I use Google search that someone is shoving ads down me.

GILLMOR: This is like saying Amazon, and we’ve talked in recent weeks about Amazon and their new services. Dan made a good point that they are built on top of, they’ve already paid for theses services and they’ve already used these services in order to use Amazon and then they’re rolling them out. In terms of our interest in this is developer focused journalist or whatever we are, that’s a big story for us, but for the general population its miniscule, people don’t even know what we’re talking about. But the impact may well be extremely great, so as far as Google is concerned about transferring, which I think is absolutely not the way to look at it. Lets say that the issue is whether or not people or Google is being aggressive is transferring from the ad model to the Google Docs, an application model. Look at Google docs being a big spin off of these server farms and this on-demand network that they have developed.

FARBER: I don’t think anything needs to be shoveled down anyone’s throats. To channel Nick Carr here, the big thing that’s happening and it’s so mundane its not even interesting, is that giant compute and giant storage are turning into pure utilities. Google is in an advantage there and by providing that in the first place, so is Amazon.
WHITMORE: But we also see IBM doing it and theoretically we could take any of the fortune 500 companies and see any of them do it too.

FARBER: I have a great business for somebody. The great business is to create the generic business they can take to Telcos and say you guys have empty buildings that are close to customers and you’re in the perfect position to put in some of this big compute and big cache and big hard drive and host all types of location based business services with little latency right here. Starting with a great place to store high definition movies that your kids are going to be shoot this Christmas. I think it’s a huge business there if they want to take it. And that the physical advantage they’re going to have over the Amazon’s and the Google’s of the world, which no matter how many they put in they wont be as convenient as a central office out of which..

ARRINGTON: Isn’t software a key part of this?

UNKNOWN: Absolutely

UNKNOWN: Yeah it is

ARRINGTON: Rackspace isn’t getting into this business and they have all the resources too right?

FARBER: I don’t think MySpace even gives a shit about this.

ARRINGTON: No Rackspace

WHITMORE: I could be like Google and wait for the market to come to me. I have to challenge what Mike said about the fortune 50 being able to do this. I don’t know if you caught that article in business week last week about the cloud and this open source Hadup program but it really shed a lot of light on how the Google approach to cloud computing is fundamentally different that the way enterprises do computing. They’ve got this fabric where each compute problem is broken up into very tiny pieces and they’re all sent off to do whatever it is they do, they’re crunching down into the binary level into tiny increments spread out around their datacenter this huge distributed super computer and then they’re in a sense recompiled back at the point of interface or where the logic comes together. That’s very different then the way applications are constructed, built or run and the economics when it comes to energy consumption and latency and demand on hardware is eventually going to outstrip the compute model that fortune 500 companies would be crazy not to say we’re gonna run back of Google, IBM, or Yahoo, or Microsoft because they’re infrastructure is going to be so much more efficient that you would be silly not to. You can create your own applications but you’re going to just pop it up on someone else’s cloud and you’re gonna pay on a subscription basis, at least that seems to be the way its going
SEARLS: Yeah, I’m not buying Nick Carr’s latest book either, basically people will leverage that cloud capabilities for mundane activities but you’re still going to need to customize a lot of stuff and run it locally. And there is nothing about the way those applications are constructed that will prevent GE from acquiring the same capabilities for something like doing that I don’t believe it’s their strategic model..

WHITMORE: The level of GE yes, but for companies that are not technology focused but are business focused at some point there will be a cost benefit analysis that says “hey we have to get out of the hardware storage business and we have to get into the business of process.” And when they do that the cloud is going to become very compelling to them.

SEARLS: There is going to be an analysis that says certain functions are better served on cloud and certain functions are better served on premise, but it will never be an either or conversation.

WHITMORE: Yeah all right I would agree with that. I don’t think that violates what Nick is saying. The side of it that lays on the utility its just going to get bigger. It doesn’t mean the other side is going to get smaller. It just means that side of it is going to get a lot larger.

FARBER: And what that effect has is that it will change the economics of everything, and while Microsoft office is not eroding, the ability for Microsoft to charge $400 a cd or for 4 years is going to shift. And they might still maintain the huge majority of people using Microsoft office, but their ability to draw money out of each and everyone of those people is going to go down precipitously.

GILLMOR: Well it’s the amount of money per customer that is what is shifting. Its very difficult to tell right now what the value is of the Google documents environment but if you start looking at Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, etc etc and examine how many dollars are transferring as a result of those transactions as opposed to Microsoft Office transactions. Office is still dominant, but there is probably, I’ll be you there is a 25% number of actual real decision making dollars that are flowing through the Google servers.

FARBER: Yeah I would agree with that. The other thing to look at from this cloud perspective is that if you’re approaching this cloud or building it out with an ad model that has being derived from advertising all new business upside from you if you’ve been going to the cloud from the position of being a Software or hardware vendor then you’re going to see this shift from per license or per CPU or per server model swiftly transfer to a per subscription or utility per blank per month model. And that’s going to be a much more difficult shift to make, not to say they’re going out of business, not to saying they’re going away but how fundamentally it will challenge them. We could talk about how horrible vendors, but look what Oracle came out with yesterday, so obviously there are still a lot of legs on that model.

GILLMOR: What was that?

FARBER: but the shift seems apparent.

WHITMORE: I’m still trying to remember the long list of all those customers that signed up for the Sun program when they launched the same thing 3 or 4 years ago.

GILLMOR: What does that mean?

WHITMORE: When sun was offered the dollar per compute engine or whatever that price model they came up with was, the utility model. And the number of customers that signed up for that is what 20? Maybe.

GILLMOR: Yeah well they also built this huge box of on demand computing that dropped into the parking lot at sun head quarters and you could say how many of those were actually adopted. Does it really matter, what they were saying and what they were implementing was at the processor level in terms of cool, on demand available low power consumption technology was and is state of the art.

ARRINGTON: So you say cool, do you mean awesome or do you mean cool?

GILLMOR: No I mean cool temperatures.

FARBER: The silly shame about Sun is that they tried to sell pick and shovels at the wrong time and no body wants to buy their picks and shovels because ultimately they’ll be competing. Sun should have come out and created zone-cloud and created their own services up there in their own application development environment, perhaps based on Net Beams because there is nothing else to do with it and then create these services, but Sun isn’t even in the ball game, they’re not even considered in the top 5 of clouds that are out there.

ARRINGTON: This is serious old school gang here, old enterprise crap that we see in the world.

UNKNOWN: Hardcore enterprise crap

GILLMOR: Hands on the floor Mike and do some web 2.0 shit for us

UNKNOWN: but this is where enterprises and web 2.0 collide.

GILLMOR: Cloud computing is not enterprises crap.

WHITMORE: I’m the guilty party here I brought up the Dan post which is titled “Microsoft Office not dead Yet”

GILLMOR: Nobody cared to read what I had to say on this and I’ll leave that as an exercise to anyone who hasn’t seen it. That what is going on inside Redmond right now is, when you say Google is going to benefit from this, yes they are and so is Microsoft. Microsoft is going to comeback big time with Siliverlight and what they are leading and putting in place. Microsoft is a big story in this space.

ARRINGTON: Silverlight 2 came out and no one noticed, but maybe someone will pop it but right now Siliverlight came out what 2 weeks ago and no one even covered it.

FARBER: If you want to get people excited, talk about ruby, talk about adobe air.

GILLMOR: I mean I watched Jon Yudel screencast the other day and there were two choices, Silverlight and Flash. I think I downloaded Silverlight a month ago and not used it didn’t open up, I don’t think there is anything to open up. It’s a runtime and Gates said this in a conversation he had with somebody that was on the net about a week ago.

ARRINGTON: Yeah

UNKNOWN: Now they’re working on stuff.

GILLMOR: Hold on, its not that they’re working on stuff, this is in release, this is production.

UNKNOWN: Well they have this search, Live search has the user interface where you can use Silverlight

GILLMOR: Microsoft has electricity now they do.

ARRINGTON: Microsoft puts out an ad where they probably sent it out to everyone on this call about windows home server, it’s like this interactive house where you can click on shit. You know what they built it in, they built it in flash. So I actually wrote about it to make fun that Microsoft doesn’t even eat their own dog food. And the reason they did this is because no one uses Silverlight, no one does. They want to sell these servers. It has a long way to go.

UNKNOWN: Yeah you’re right

UNKNOWN: There is a big syntax between developer tools division and..

ARRINGTON: Its great Jon Yudel is using it but when Microsoft starts using it for hotmail it will be more interesting.

GILLMOR: You guys what I’m trying to say is right now flash is ubiquitous. There is a very interesting story from some Flex evangelist or developer a couple days ago talking about how Yahoo has dumped Flex and therefore flash, Flex 1.5 and gone back to html. In other words there is a whole rich client thing.

ARRINGTON: They dumped Flex and therefore flash, was that your editorial Steve? They can build Flex outside of Flash I’m just wondering is that your editorial?

GILLMOR: They were going back to an html, dhtml, AJAX model as opposed to.

ARRINGTON: Well they just launched an election site with flash last week.

GILLMOR: Let me just finish what I’m trying to say. The reason given by this guy is that flash developers or flex developers at the 2.0 level are getting so much money now, because there is so much opportunity for them that there is a versioning issue within the Flash community. It does not mean they’re going out of business, it does not mean someone’s switching to a Microsoft strategy or not. And what Gate said the other day, I think is exactly right on, which is it doesn’t matter it’s a probably on most broadband connections, I know this for a fact as I downloaded it, for whatever reason I downloaded it and it probably took 30 seconds or 10 seconds or I have no idea. I never saw it, a little request came up and said you are installed and the next time I used it was the other day looking at something that Johnny Dell did. Just see whether I detect it or.

ARRINGTON: Yeah that’s great.

GILLMOR: Alright so the question is who are developer communities who are writing to which platform? And I think that anybody who is naive enough to think Microsoft is going to let go of their direct connection. I mean Robert Anderson on this call is an extremely experienced CTO of Microsoft technologies development company and there are a lot of people out there, who making a lot of money, writing to that platform. And not only are they not going away, that platform is getting really powerful. If you look at what’s going on with all the server relationships that are going on in terms of server technologies at Microsoft, they are not only making money, hand over fist in the server area but integration servers, XML servers. All the stuff, it goes back to all the horrendous enterprises applications from Mike loves so much.

ANDERSON: The major 5 clouds that are out there..

ARRINGTON: What I like talking about are Ferraris and Porches and stuff and what you guys like talking about is like mufflers and tailpipes.

ANDERSON: Mike did a Podcast this summer interviewing the Silverlight head, didn’t you at TechAd or something.

ARRINGTON: Yeah but that was like, you know.

ANDERSON: What I got out of it was that they were designing that for people with .Net and it was like the version of what flash could do, but only for the people .net API world, wasn’t that the point?

ARRINGTON: Of course that’s always the point. I find it pretty funny that I said Ferraris, Porches and you said yeah muffler, muffler, muffler, muffler..(laughs)

ANDERSON: Yeah but how’s that muffler? How is this whole infrastructure behind this cloud computing system, either enterprises or web 2.0, how is it mufflers.

(lots of chatter)

WHITMORE: I think everything you don’t understand must be a muffler.

GILLMOR: There are these sexy tools that we call an iPhone that we have in our hands that have endearing stories of O’Malik stealing peoples bandwidth so he can send his email. On one end of the spectrum and on the other end of the spectrum its all the shit that actually makes that work and that’s the servers on the other end.

ARRINGTON: And all those car part manufacturers make a ton of money, it’s just, you know.

ANDERSON: Well we’re sorry if we’re boring you Mike.

ARRINGTON: You don’t sound sorry, you sound offended.

ANDERSON: You’re right, it was sarcasm.

GILLMOR: Alright well we got that straight. This act is staying.

WHITMORE: Well back to this Microsoft thing of the 5 predominant clouds out there only Microsoft is building Microsoft..

ARRINGTON: You guys got 43 minutes of this thing, can we talk about anything else today?

ANDERSON: We’ll explain to you how it all comes back to the radiator and the muffler.

GILLMOR: Hey this show, clearly I’m not in control of Mike. So..

(lots of Chatter)

ARRINGTON: The five major car phone or car horn manufacturers, who’s honking their phone?

UNKNOWN: Eh me

ARRINGTON: So who’s at their computer, Netsuite went public are they a billion dollar company right now?

GILLMOR: Ugh I don’t know.

ARRINGTON: They were priced to be out at 26 I think.

GILLMOR: And what was the target?

ARRINGTON: It was supposed to be at 1.5.

UNKNOWN: Online business apps

GILLMOR: This must be revenge of Salesforce. I mean this guy has been chasing Salesforce for years and this guy.

ARRINGTON: Did anybody check the price. They got N symbol on the stock exchange, one letter.

UNKNOWN: I mean I wish them luck, but the one thing that always leaves me scratching my head about is, I mean I would give Salesforce credit for going out and recruiting developers and build an eco-system, but NetSuite doesn’t seem to have that yet.

ARRINGTON: Well I have to wish them luck, all of their founders are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean they made it.

ANDERSON: Larry Ellison hedged a bet and is giving the money to his kids apparently and this is just a diversion, kind of a fun pet project for him, talk about Ferrari.

GILLMOR: Well Salesforces was too. I mean he funded both of them.

ANDERSON: Uhhh I don’t think he was a major contributor in Salesforce, the same way he was with NetSuite.

ARRINGTON: I thought he was actually.

GILLMOR: Ya, he was and also by the way I was right about the, uh, I’ll send a message to everyone about what I was write about, I can’t remember right now.

(laughter)

ANDERSON: Well Larry is usually right about everything, you gotta give him that.

GILLMOR: Alright, that was a great tour out of the muffler shop.

WHITMORE: More? You wanna talk about more?

GILLMOR: Ya, I mean, what else?

ARRINGTON: I wanna talk about my stuff. What’s this about Apple shutting down, what blog did they shut down?

GILLMOR: Think Secret.

ARRINGTON: Ya, so what’s the back-story on that?

GILLMOR: This was a while ago. Think Secret published some proprietary information about one of the iPods or something like that.

ARRINGTON: Who wouldn’t have published that if they got their hands on it.

GILLMOR: I mean, would you be in, I mean this guy is like thanking Apple for giving him the opportunity to go back to school.

ARRINGTON: Dan, would you have published it if you got it?

FARBER: Ya.

ARRINGTON: Did he just never revealed the source, is that what really brought it?

GILMORE: Ya, the wrap is ya, I read the article when it happened. I think we all did. The point was that he was writing his own blog and he was unprotected legally and he got hammered.

FARBER: Oh I get it, so Ferrari is when we talk about gossip blogs?

ARRINGTON: Well I really pissed you guys off, didn’t I?

ANDERSON: No, we just think it’s a funny analogy.

ARRINGTON: Well it’s true right, I mean, it’s, I’m waiting for the …

GILLMOR: I’m waiting for the Ferrari. You keep talking about these Ferraris that are sitting out there idling in the courtyard, where are they? So we’re talking about Apple now.

ARRINGTON: We can talk about Honda accords too, I think it’s far more interesting than talking about.. well.. I mean it’s obviously fascinating to you guys and to a few listeners.

FARBER: Well let’s talk about page views, how do you get all those page views? How do you create all that inventory about, you know, anything that anybody will click on so that you can do well. You know, isn’t that the real big question these days?

ARRINGTON: Ya, you write interesting stuff.

FARBER: Interesting to whom about what? You obviously want to write about Ferraris, not mufflers.

ARRINGTON: Ya, I appeal to the Ferrari crowd. I mean (interrupted)

FARBER: Actually, I’d say you appeal to the muffler crowd because it’s more than pedestrian web page, gossip, you know who’s new, who’s hot, stuff, which is modestly interesting and gets a lot of people to click on but in the long run, doesn’t have a lot of impact on the history and future of computing.

ARRINGTON: You don’t think YouTube has had an influence on the culture?

FARBER: Well on the culture, ya.

ARRINGTON: I will dive in to gossip, but I think about like YouTube, I think it’s gonna have a pretty major, I mean I made my blog on the launch and sale of YouTube and I think it’s gonna have a much more significant impact on our culture and will have a much bigger place in the history

GARDNER: And what is going to allow you to function it in order to change the landscape of media, advertising and culture, it’s going to be running on a computer.

ARRINGTON: Why am I on trial here? Ya you’re right, I’m just saying that it’s not that interesting.

GILLMOR: What, you’re talking about Mike is presentation, which is, you’re both talking about the same story and subject matter.

ARRINGTON: Subject matter.

GILLMOR: I mean, is it really about the subject matter? Because every time that Dana makes a point that YouTube is a story of leveraging an on demand environment that is fueled by the technologies that may be more boring to talk about.

ARRINGTON: No, I think YouTube is an engine of self-expression that’s changed the world and has had very little… (interruption) it’s great that Adobe allowed that to happen in a very easy way, but the much more interesting thing is the content and the self-expression.

GILLMOR: Ok, which is more, I’m going to go around and ask this, which has changed the world more, YouTube or the iPhone. Michael Arrington?

ARRINGTON: The iPhone is a Ferrari too.

GILLMOR: Would you put them as peers?

ARRINGTON: Ya.

GILLMOR: Ok, good. Dan Farber?

FARBER: Dumb question. (laughs) Gigner or Mary-Anne?

GILLMOR: I’m going to ask the fucking question, then you can all say it is dumb, and then we’ll move on. Dana?

GARDNER: So, all in favor of agreeing with Dan?

ALL: Yes, agree.

GILLMOR: Ok, great.

FARBER: A better question would be what’s more important, YouTube or the fabric behind it that’s going to allow almost anything to be delivered as a service.

(chatter)


GARDNER: All these are really dull, I don’t know how we’re going down these rat holes and trying to say is “is infrastructure more important than YouTube or not” I mean it’s all one web of fabric of good stuff and bad stuff all rolled up together.

FARBER: It’s like that story in the New York Times today about how down Silcon Valley, down near San Jose, everyone is into engineering, but if you go up the peninsula to San Francisco, it’s about marketing and advertising, isn’t that kind of what we’re talking about? They’re all kinda connected somewhere in like Belmont or something, San Mateo.

GARDNER: Where mostly here in America we go to the grocery store and there’s so much food, and we drive in a nice car.

ARRINGTON: Who here on the call has ever removed a tick from a dog?

(laughter)

FARBER: You get some rubbing alcohol and you poor it on the tick and it starts to come out.

ARRINGTON: I’ve done it a hundred times… I’m pulling one out, right.

FARBER: There’s the match trick too

ARRINGTON: Ya, but I just pull on it.

GILLMOR: Well we’ve certainly gone blue collar now

(laughter)

It’s pretty gross. What do you use to wash the skunk smell off their pets? Tomato Juice right?

(laughter)

UNKNOWN: Thousand Island dressing.

GILLMOR: Vodka and Blood Mary mix, everyone is happy on that one.

GARDNER: How many people are actually taking more than two days off for the holidays?

UNKNOWN: I’m taking a few days off.

UNKNOWN: I’m taking next week off.

ARRINGTON: So Steve, can I make a minor announcement? Do you mind?

GILLMOR: No, not at all.

ARRINGTON: I’ve been on TV yesterday and today for the first time. Live Television. I am, I know you guys probably has been on TV quite a bit, I haven’t. We were announcing this Tech President Primary, so we put up every presidential candidates positions on the tech issues, which was actually a lot of work, and we’re allowing people to vote for who they think would make the best “Tech President” and then we’re going to make an official endorsement based on that and so anyway, the real big media is picking it up, I had to get up at 6 two days in a row to drive to the city and I was on ABC yeterday and FOX today, spoke a couple of hours officially on the blog, so it was kinda fun, fun for me anyway.

GILLMOR: So what will you be saying in a couple of hours when this is airing?

ARRINGTON: Well I’ll also be doing a blog post, just as an announcement and linking it to the site on TechCrunch, which is primaries.techcrunch.com and also putting up clips of the stuff from TV.

GILLMOR: So do you have any preliminary thoughts about who your candidates are going to be?

ARRINGTON: Ya, I mean Barack is the guy that has thought through the issues more than anyone else, but I don’t necessarily agree with every position he has. I think that John Edwards has some interesting thoughts, Ron Paul has some interesting thoughts. The Republicans are actually pretty sad when it comes to tech issues in general, um, but Ron Paul is probably the most interesting.

FARBER: Do you really think that the election is going to be won or lost on tech issues?

ARRINGTON: No, I don’t think it will have any impact at all. However, I do think that it’s making the candidates think about the issues and they may not have otherwise thought about them. I mean I know for a fact that Mit Romney had not considered net neutrality until he was preparing for the Podcast I did with him. I think Barack was thinking about these issues but a lot of the other candidates weren’t, so I think we’re doing some good in that way. And I also think that it will be a lot of fun to look at the candidates and how they come out on the issues.

GILLMOR: So what is the relationship with ABC, how does that work?

ARRINGTON: I’ve talked to ABC and FOX and a couple other shows, just if they want to talk about it and they said ya. So yesterday, ABC taped a segment, today I was live on FOX this morning, just talking about this and interviewing me about it. I was nervous, and TV’s not a medium I’m very comfortable in, but it’s fun.

FARBER: Did you just talk into a flash cam?

ARRINGTON: Yesterday, on ABC I was talking into a camera. Today was live with the host, with the morning show on a local FOX.

FARBER: It will be national next week?

ARRINGTON: ABC was national. There are stations, so that’s a lot of them. But FOX was a lot more fun because it was an actual human interactions.

FARBER: Come in, I’ll put you on my show.

ARRINGTON: Who just said that?

FARBER: Dan.

ARRINGTON: You have a show?

(laughs)

FARBER: Ya, I have all kinds of shows.

GARDNER: About mufflers and shock absorbers?

FARBER: It’s just not on your local commercial television network.

GARDNER: He’s been doing a podcast for years, with David Berland. Come on, Dan and David Show, wake up.

ARRINGTON: Are you kidding? I’ve never once heard your podcast, where is it? Is it promoted on Between the Lines?

FARBER: Ya, once a week it gets promoted on Between the Lines. It’s got a podcast stage and about 1.7 million listeners. Or it might be 17, I’m not sure which.

GARDNER: It’s 17 people downloading 1.7 million times.

ARRINGTON: I’d love to be on that show. In fact, could I be on it every week? It would be a lot more interesting than other shows I’ve been on.

FARBER: I might be able to arrange that. I might be able to arrange that. Because I need to compete with the Gilmor Gang.

GILLMOR: Well, you know I think between Calacanis and Arrington there’s a lot of shopping going on

(interrupted)

ARRINGTON: Did you see Calacanis and I on Twitter yesterday?

GILLMOR: What?

ARRINGTON: Did you see Calacanis and I on Twitter yesterday?

GILLMOR: Umm, what were you saying?

ARRINGTON: He said, he was asking if he should boycott the show today, and I said I was boycotting so that he couldn’t also, so I didn’t actually boycott, I couldn’t help but call in.

GILLMOR: Ya, I was surprised that you were here. I saw several comments from Marshall Kirkpatrick.

ARRINGTON: Well you pissed me off, but I know you meant well. I know you’re just awkward socially, but I know you mean well. So that’s why I’m one.

GILLMOR: Well I appreciate that.

FARBER: Can I use that next time I piss off a vendor? I’m just awkward socially, but I meant well?

GILLMOR: Ok, well now that we’ve had all the warm kissies. I’m not even going to try and regain control.

GARDNER: It’s because we’re in a Christmas show so there’s no control point. You are no longer in control.

GILLMOR: I’m just trying to sit back and accept it.

FARBER: Maybe it’s no longer the game, it’s just a rabble.

GARDNER: Reckless punditry

ARRINGTON: I’ve suggested a couple of things, but I’m not going to suggest anything else.

FARBER: Why, because they were so well received before?

(laughter)

ARRINGTON: Hey let’s talk about middle-ware

GROUP: No!

GILLMOR: How about this one? FCC blesses Google DoubleClick. Does anyone care that this is like the next great monopoly?

GARDNER: Steam-roller. People don’t care because nobody sees Google as a threat.

FARBER: We need, and then Viacom, runs over and embraces Microsoft as a result thereof, duh. So how many people are going to run over to embrace Microsoft now because Google’s got DoubleClick, I am.

GARDNER: It’s still up in the air in Europe and Europe’s economy is going to do much better than ours next year, so the big decision is probably yet to come. Is Google going to become the new gorilla and everyone is going to see Microsoft as the underdog now?

FARBER: Ya, it’s like the iPod and the Zune, it’s the same relationship. But if you’re an advertiser, you can advertise to them both.

GILLMOR: The Zune, what does the Zune do? Have you ever held one?

FARBER: No, that’s one I’m saying.

GILLMOR: Ok, thank you.

FARBER: I’ve seen one in a car.

GILLMOR: I haven’t. I’ve never seen one. I think I walked by one at Frys.

FARBER: It feels like every car ad on television is trying to give away a Zune that’s embedded in the car.

GILLMOR: They better hurry up.

GARDNER: Who’s going to buy Yahoo?

GILLMOR: Nobody.

FARBER: Microsoft

GILLMOR: Really? How much you wanna bet?

FARBER: What do you mean, how much do I want to bet?

GILLMOR: $10 bucks that by the end of this year, no fucking way. $10 bucks.

FARBER: That’s like one-one-millionth of a penny for every outstanding share. Let’s making it interesting.

GILLMOR: I’m making it interesting, I’m saying $10 bucks, do you accept that?

FARBER: I accept your wager.

GARDNER: I’ll raise you $10.

FARBER: I beleive that online gambling is illegal and people just got fined for that today.

GILLMOR: Ya, but this show isn’t going to be on the air, so who cares.

GARDNER: Is this another dead files show?

GILLMOR: Ya, did you hear last week’s, the part that I didn’t post?

GARDNER: No, what happened?

GILLMOR: It was all silence, so I had edit it out or the police would be after it.

GARDNER: Right.

GILLMOR: There’s been some really great comments in the Facebook group that you should go look at. There was somebody who asked as question about something that they wanted us to talk about. Talk amongst yourselves while I go find it.

FARBER: Keep playing stump the chumps.

GARDNER: For all this talk about Ferrari’s and mufflers, let’s get the car guys on here. Don’t drive like my brother. You know those guys?

FARBER: Car talk?

GARDNER: What is Mike Vizzard not on Facebook?

GILLMOR: He is on Facebook.

GARDNER: Ok, so that’s fairly new then.

GILLMOR: Ok, so here’s the question, this is from Chris Herbert of Colorado College: the giving it away for free idea, eg. Radio Head effect, received mainstream media attention from New York Times recently and Boing-Boing just linked to recent Chris Anderson video about Free, which he’s writing about for his next book, this topic is quite a discreet news item of the week but the big picture implications of this idea are huge for many industries, not just technology and music. Then he asked for Nick Carter to say something, but Nick’s not on the show this week. The second thing he says is, New York Times story on researchers at Harvard and UCLA studying social networking norms per publically available info on Facebook, begs the question, who owns your social networking information, can I export it whenever and wherever I want? Should people be asked before their Facebook data is analyzed in the academic world. Any interest?

FARBER: Free sounds good, and sure people should be asked.

GILLMOR: Mike, are you still there? OK, alright?

GARDNER: Too many muffler jokes.

GILLMOR: Ok, well I appreciate the, I’m not sure that I understand what he’s talking about the Radio Head Effect? Who’s that?

GILLMOR: Ok, I just read out some questions from someone in the audience.

SEARLS: Isn’t is basically the concept that if you give away something for free you can eventually build an aftermarket around it.

GARDNER: What’s the subject?

GILLMORE: I’ll read it one more time, the giving it away free idea, for example, the Radio Head Effect, received mainstream coverage from the New York Times recently and Boing-Boing just linked to recent Chris Anderson video about Free, which he’s writing about for his next book, this topic is quite a discreet news item of the week but the big picture implications of this idea are huge, not just technology and music, have Nick relate the idea to the premise of his new book. I think we’ve covered the on-Demand premise as it relates to..

FARBER: But shouldn’t on-Demand be free because you are going to build a market place around it

SEARLS: Right, I think the answer is that it shouldn’t be free but it should be cheap, you know its a commodity, but people making money on commodities, you know the real question is how much larger is the business, or how many more businesses are made possible by the availability of that cheap utility.

FARBER: I just wonder how much free stuff we can give away before somebody actually has to get paid for something.

SEARLS: What are people giving away free right now that they’re not getting paid for?

GILLMOR: Well, I mean, Google Docs technically, Apps

SEARLS: Are the people giving away stuff for free not making money some other way?

GARDNER: They are making money usually one some advertising plight behind it.

SEARLS: So they are making on advertising, but they might be making money at something else, so I mean, IBM gives away Linux but they make money other ways. They still sell services. You know, the net is free.

GILLMOR: I know what it is, we’ve rediscovered the razor blade, right.

FARBER: Well, there’s loss leaders and then there’s creators and monetization other ways.

GARDNER: Razorblade, you lock them in and then get them on the recurring revenue.

GILLMOR: I’m not sure you lock them in a lot of cases.

FARBER: Well you don’t lock them in physically or technically, but just the fact that they have become accustomed to it..

GILLMOR: If you lock someone in by making them addicted, then you got them

SEARLS: So I’m not locked into Rackspace, but I like their service, I mean I can put Searls.com on lots of servers all over the place it wouldn’t be any trouble at all, well some trouble, that’s probably part of the idea, but I mean a hosting service is pretty generic at this point and they differentiate by service, they give better service than the other guys, so I use them and I pay a little more for that, maybe. But the, you know, there is a lot of stuff that’s cheap enough or free enough and to me the big question is when are people like the tel-co’s and cable-co’s of the world going to realize that by making their stuff cheaper and easier and IP based, you know, are they going to be able to create and support many many more businesses than they are right now, you know, just by selling triple play. That’s, in Europe, they are realizing that, you know we can be in all kinds of businesses here, we don’t just have to be in those three we’ve already got the customers, what can we do for those customers that’s more than what they were doing right now. And that’s, too me, that’s the biggest question on the table is at what point are the cable-co’s and tel-co’s going to realize that there are more than three businesses that they can be in, and an infinite number of businesses that they can support and still make money doing.

FARBER: When are they going to realize that if they don’t have a cloud that’s sufficient and scaled to the moon, that all they are is bitpipes and their ability to charge for that is going to go away, and then so who wins in in the long run is the people who were able to create a computing environment for the most cost efficient, highly scaling basis, and put anything on it. Right?

SEARLS: Right

FARBER: So what we should be thinking about for the likes of AT&T is when are you guys going to start acting like Google, not just by the business model but by the fabric and technology that incurs your entire business.

SEARLS: It’s a real long shot and it’s going to get worse before it gets better with those guys.

FARBER: Ya

GILLMOR: Which guys?

SEARLS: With, basically there are two companies: Verizon and AT&T and I think that Verizon is a little better off than AT&T is because they’re a little bit more clueful but you know, kudos to Verizon, I’m getting fiber connection at my house, it’s bundled with television I’d rather not get, but it works, and I’m getting 20 mbs down and 5 mbs up, it works very well, and they’re not blocking port 25, high five to them for doing that. I can use two different SMTP servers without getting either one of those blocked, that’s nice. They are blocking port 80 and they charge to the nose if I want to run a business, which is a mistake, I think they should not charge to the nose at all if I want to run a business, I’ve got fiber running to my house, why shouldn’t I be able to run a business? But they are preventing that, they think if you’re going to run a business, then we can charge you a hell of a lot more. Well, go ahead and do that, I’m not going to run it out of here.

GARDNER: What makes the mistake that they can actually determine the difference between a business and a modern fully wired house.

SEARLS: Well they really can’t, you know, if I wanted to run a server in my house, which I might, I can’t do that, you know they promise a little bit more reliability and 24/7 support, shit like that.

GARDNER: Whether they recognize it or not they are just pushing you into the arms of a cloud provider like Google because you can have a server anywhere. They should be encouraging you to put a server in your house because that is going to tie you into them indispensably.

SEARLS: No kidding, if I were them, I would just look at instead of trying to be in the cable business, which they are doing a terrible job of by the way, because they don’t really know how to be a cable company, another guy sat next to me on a plane not long ago was a Verizon engineer who works on their set-top box who told all kinds of stories about how they started with Microsoft Windows Media and that didn’t work out and something else didn’t work out and they are still figuring it out, they are really not a cable company and they don’t know how to do it, well why even be a cable company, why not just open the pipes and provide services.

GARDNER: Be a services provider, you betcha

SEARLS: The thing is, in the long run, the content that is going to matter is the stuff being produced by their customers. Those customers are buying high definition cameras at Christmas and all kinds of other times, they will be producing all kinds of fat content that they are going to want to share and to send places and, why not make it easy, why not add back end services to that? why not do offsite backup? Even if they are using S3 as a backend, just make it easy for people. There’s a huge pile of businesses in that.

GARDNER: It seems to obvious, I don’t know why.

GILLMOR: Well, I think Dan has said something really interesting, when he pointed out that they are driving people to their real competitors which is Google.

SEARLS: And Amazon

GILLMOR: So I want to see the sign up by where Dana lives that says in that modern house, there’s no business going on here.

FARBER: I don’t have a server, but I’m running a busniess, and I’m not paying any more than the next guy.
SEARLS: Right, me too.

GILLMOR: I mean, this is ya know, we’re all drug dealers and the drug is information. You know, go down to the basement and there’s a hydroponics farm called the Internet.

SEARLS: Merry Christmas, everybody, I gotta get going.

GILLMOR: What are you doing for the holidays? Doc?

SEARLS: Tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive through the snow and probably some rain will fall out of here in Boston to Providence in a rental car, drop that off, get in a plane, fly to Baltimore, hang out with the new grandkid and other family members, have Christmas there, then we’re gonna go to Sun Valley, to where I’ve never been, and ski, which I hope I don’t get killed doing, because I’m older than ever, but I love to do it, and that’s until about New Years. After that, we’re going to our actual home in Santa Barbara and cool out for a few days, and then I’m going to go CES and have fun, looking at that, in Las Vegas, then come back here and do some really cool stuff here that we were just talking about during the 15 minutes that I was off the line. So ya, it’s all good, it’s all good.

UNKNOWN: One of the joys of having children is you can make all the other relatives come to you, so I don’t have to know anywhere near an airport, and so I’m going to keep here until at least the middle of January

GILLMOR: Dan Farber, what are you going to do?

FARBER: I’m gonna head up to the north country.

GILLMOR: To your estate?

FARBER: My little house in the mountains, yes.

GILLMOR: Excellent, and do you have wi-fi up there?

FARBER: I have EVDO

GILLMOR: Ah ha, and let’s see, who else is on the call. Robert?

ANDERSON: Ya, my sister is coming into town actually, so we’ll be hosting Christmas at my place and then heading to Merced back where my parents live and my kids.

GILLMOR: Dana, did you tell us what you’re doing?

GARDNER: Well, pretty much all my family lives within 10 minutes of here, so there’s no travel invovled. But we’ve got two feet of snow on the ground now, so we’ll get some skiing in. And you know, I could just use a couple of days off, so I’m hoping to shut the computer off for more than, you know, 12 hours and see if that makes me feel better, I think it might.

FARBER: My sun has observed that since he moved to New England, all of the sports teams have become perfect, nearly. And we’ve brought snow to the ski areas, which is, really handy.

GARDNER: We’ve had a real winter and it’s not even winter yet.

FARBER: What about you Steve? What are you doing?

GILLMOR: Ahh, let’s see. I can tell you the truth…

(laughter)

I’m just trying to give a little Jason to the show since he’s not here. You know, where everything he says is either true or not ture and the tough time is to figure out which one it is. So, um, basically, uh, my wife and I are going back to Charleston, South Carolina to re-join my wife’s parents and our kids who are already there.

UNKNOWN: Oh, that’s wonderful.

GILLMOR: Looking forward to, um, having to be somebody’s elses problem, not my own so much.

UNKNOWN: That’s great.

GILLMOR: Ya, I think it’s going to be one of the best Christmas’ in a long time, and holiday season, so I really appreciate it everybody who’s been on the call and joined the gang since it retrurned. I hope we can keep it going. Ok this is Steve Gillmor, for the gang, see you next time, if there is a next time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Gillmor Gang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.